Juliet du Boulay: To recognize the enduring quality of much that I describe is not, however, to ignore the fact that change has always been a part of village life, and indeed so many changes have happened since I was in Ambeli in the 1960s and 1970s that much of the way of life recounted here can no longer be found. Earlier changes begin with the village itself, which had been built around 1800 by families who escaped there from a lower village which had been devastated by the Turks. Before this some of the big families were said to have come in a boat from the north, perhaps Pelion. These upheavals, however, dramatic though they were, did not necessitate a deep change of values but simply a reinterpretation of ancient themes in the new situation.
Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé: It cannot be repeated too often: it is the characters of those resolute men which take hold of the people, not their ideas; and the philosopher’s piercing eye in this matter looks beyond Russia. Men are everywhere becoming less and less unreasonable as regards ideas, and more and more skeptical as regards cut-and-dried formulas. Those who believe in the virtue of absolute doctrines are now rare to find. What does captivate men is character, even if their energies are put to a wrong purpose, for that guarantees a leader and a guide, the first requirements of an association of human beings. Man is born the “serf” of every will stronger than his own that passes before him.
Anthony O’Hear: Do we have reluctantly to conclude that in 2010, for all our personal chippiness, when it comes to what really matters, deference and servility are now uppermost (or is it just laziness)?
Early in September some good baseball should be seen on the Hyde Park ground, for the championship of England is to be decided there, between the best American team and the best Canadian. It is greatly to be feared that there is no possible chance of an English team carrying off the world’s palm. The Americans would be delighted if there were such a possibility.
Ronald G. Walters: To attack present-day critics of science as misguided and cranky radicals does more than violate the historical record: it obscures problems within science itself and the degree to which it invites hard scrutiny, particularly when applied to social issues. On that score, the sources of frustration among intellectuals and the public alike are several. The historical record contains reminders that what seem to be progressive uses of science from one perspective look reactionary in hindsight.
Andrew Sinclair: The running style in this extended account is that of a newsman, sniffing out the good stories. And there are plenty of them, from that golden age of gossip and occasional retribution. Although there is a great deal of dazzle and detail, there is little new in the causes and consequences of Prohibition – the rural saloon and the rise of women’s rights, the conflict of the country against the city, the attack on foreigners and the surge of nativism, and the economic reasons for Repeal.
Anthony O’Hear: The picture of philosophy which I am here sketching, in which philosophy is part of a rational, but personal quest for meaning might not be recognised in many philosophy departments (or not by their students, anyway), and would be hard to discern in many of the most acclaimed philosophical writings of to-day.
Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé: One feels angry with the author for being so prolix, one runs on ahead of him, and, all of a sudden, he is no longer understood – the electric current has been interrupted. That, at least, is what everybody tells me who has tried it.
Nicolson: ‘The real centre of his hospital life was, however, to be the Hôpital Broussais, in the rue Didot, which he first entered in December 1886. Verlaine always had a weakness for this particular hospital. ‘
Basil Field: In the happy days of old, when fish were foolish, and fishermen were few, one, two, three, or more flies were fastened at intervals on a line; a cast was made across the stream, the rod-point was depressed, and the flies allowed to sink as they drifted down the current. When the line became fully extended, the flies began to rise to the surface, and to sweep round in a curve towards the bank on which the angler stood, the fly nearest him, called the “bob-fly,” tripping and dancing as it skimmed the water.
Anthony O’Hear: It is interesting to see in these three very different books some thoughtful intellectuals demurring from the secularism which had until recently reigned virtually unchallenged among the self-professed thinking classes.
Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé: During his last year of freedom (before going to prison) the obsession of imaginary maladies, trouble with his nerves, and a “mystic fright,” were driving him straight into a state of mental derangement, and we can believe him. He assures us that he was only saved by the sudden change in his manner of life, for it compelled him to brace himself against the misfortunes which had hitherto mastered him. I accept this statement, for the secrets of the soul are unassailable; and it is certain that there is nothing better to cure an imaginary illness than real misfortune.
W. E. Garrett Fisher: Dr Bastian’s discovery can hardly be overrated in its bearing on one of the most difficult and interesting questions which biology has yet to resolve.
Denis Boyles: In the Euro-zone, populism is kept in place by encouraging dependence on the state. That dependence is so deeply entrenched now that not even the French health-care disaster of 2003 could disturb it. When 15,000 mostly elderly citizens perished in a three-week heat wave after government services collapsed, it left utterly unaffected both the political establishment and the journalists who cover and largely support it.
Anthony O’Hear: Perhaps our days are not quite so tolerant, after all. The two figures who loom over the book as a whole and over many of the individual chapters are the now largely forgotten nineteenth century writers, Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper. Both argued noisily and vociferously that religion in general and Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, in particular had been major obstacles to scientific progress and discovery, and it is against this view that most of the articles are directed.
Why doesn’t Britain have a Tea Party?
Anthony O’Hear: Do we have reluctantly to conclude that in 2010, for all our personal chippiness, when it comes to what really matters, deference and servility are now uppermost (or is it just laziness)?